-May-19-2026-05-49-20-9594-PM.png?width=1080&name=image%20(2)-May-19-2026-05-49-20-9594-PM.png)
The Background
Becoming Discoverable in the Age of AI
Every morning, someone opens ChatGPT and types a variation of the same question: which booking platform should I use to run my salon? They are not browsing a website or reading a comparison blog. They are asking an answer engine for a recommendation, and they expect a direct, confident answer.
For Fresha, the world's leading marketplace platform for beauty, wellness, and self-care, this shift represents both the biggest opportunity and the most consequential risk in how they grow. The company serves over 120,000 businesses across 120 countries, from independent nail technicians in London to multi-location spa chains in New York, offering a subscription-based platform that handles bookings, payments, client management, and everything in between. Their mission is simple but ambitious: give every beauty and wellness professional the tools to run and grow their business without the overhead that legacy software demands.
-May-19-2026-05-49-21-4129-PM.png?width=668&height=376&name=image%20(1)-May-19-2026-05-49-21-4129-PM.png)
That mission depends on being discoverable at the moment their potential partners are making decisions. And increasingly, that moment is happening on answer engines.
The Challenge
The Question That Couldn't Wait for Google
When a salon owner researches booking platforms today, the journey rarely starts with a search engine results page. It starts with a prompt. "What is the best salon booking software?" "Which booking app do most spas use?" "Compare Fresha and its competitors." Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, millions of prospective partners are forming opinions, shortlisting options, and sometimes making decisions before they ever visit a vendor website or speak to a sales rep.
Fresha had known this was happening. Elliott Braund, VP of Revenue Operations, had been watching the shift and trying to respond to it. His job is to build the channels through which Fresha acquires its partners at global scale. When AI-first research started changing how those partners shortlist platforms, it became his problem to solve. "It's not an opportunity anymore," Elliott says. "You will get left behind if you're not investing in AI."
Manual Work, Invisible Results
The problem was not awareness. The problem was infrastructure. For roughly two years, Fresha had been investing in answer engine optimization without the tools to do it at scale. Elliott's team was manually querying ChatGPT with prompts like "best beauty and wellness booking system," screenshotting the results, and trying to piece together a picture of where Fresha appeared across different models. There was no way to aggregate that view, measure movement over time, or understand which sources the answer engines were pulling from to form their recommendations.
The team could sense they were winning in some places and losing in others, but they could not prove it, prioritize it, or act on it systematically. Without a connected system, every insight disappeared as soon as the screenshot was taken. AEO was a practice they believed in but could not operationalize.
The Solution
Seeing the Full Picture, for the First Time
When salon owners and spa managers ask an answer engine which booking platform to trust with their livelihood, Fresha now knows exactly what they find. That certainty did not exist before HubSpot AEO.
With prompt tracking and an AI Visibility Score across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, Fresha replaced a fragmented, screenshot-based process with a single connected dashboard. Elliott's team could now track visibility across every answer engine that mattered, see how they ranked against named competitors on specific prompts, and measure movement over time. The guesswork was gone. In its place was a live, structured picture of exactly how Fresha showed up when it mattered most.
From Monitoring to Action
Knowing their AI Visibility Score was only the beginning. The second shift came through citation analysis, and it changed how Fresha thought about content investment entirely.
Citation analysis showed the team which sources the answer engines were pulling from when they formed recommendations in the beauty and wellness booking category. What the data revealed surprised them: third-party industry publications were being cited far more frequently than Fresha's own pages. On-site SEO alone was not going to move the needle. To earn more citations, Fresha needed to earn more coverage.
That insight triggered a two-pronged strategy. On their own site, they built content specifically designed for AI consumption: clearer structure, stronger factual framing, and dedicated feature landing pages including a Payments page and a Scheduling page that directly answered the questions answer engines were tracking.
In parallel, they invested in third-party coverage using a simple rule: any publisher that appeared repeatedly in their citation data went to the top of their partnership list. They leaned into customer success stories and case studies as well, recognizing that AI engines consistently surface businesses backed by credible third-party validation.
A Weekly Rhythm That Runs Like a Channel
Prompt-level visibility and competitive benchmarking gave Fresha's team a third capability: the ability to run AEO like a managed acquisition channel rather than a monitoring exercise. The operating rhythm Elliott built is deliberate. Every week, the team reviews the AEO dashboard to identify prompts where visibility has dropped or where a competitor is consistently being recommended over Fresha. They examine citation analysis for that prompt cluster to determine whether the gap is an owned-content problem, a third-party coverage problem, or both.
From there, the content or partnerships team receives a prioritized brief covering the prompt, the competitive gap, and the recommended asset type. They publish, wait for the answer engines to re-index, and then track visibility movement on the original prompt cluster inside HubSpot AEO. The result is a channel with a defined input, a measurable output, and clear accountability across teams.
The Transformation
From Invisible to Undeniable
When salon owners and spa managers now query an answer engine about booking platforms, what they find is Fresha: described confidently, accurately, and ahead of every competitor. That is not an accident. It is the product of a structured practice built on real data.
Fresha holds an AI Visibility Score of 68.3%, the highest in their competitive set, and ranks first across all 8 AI platforms the team tracks. On Google Gemini, their visibility score reaches 87.9%. On Google AI Overviews, it is 72.5%. On the high-intent commercial prompts that drive the most qualified prospective partners, "online salon booking software" scores 85.1% and "book beauty treatments near me" reaches 81.7%. These are not soft brand metrics. They are rankings on the exact prompts a salon owner types before deciding which platform to run their business on.
Warmer Leads, Faster Conversations
The commercial impact extends downstream into the sales process itself. Prospects who have already heard Fresha recommended by an answer engine arrive differently. They come pre-qualified and pre-convinced. The trust that a human sales conversation would ordinarily have to build over multiple touchpoints is already present before the first call. Conversations move faster. Deals close faster.
AEO has stopped being a marketing experiment and become a pipeline metric with commercial accountability — one measured not just by visibility scores but by the warmth and conversion rates of the leads that flow from them.
Owning the Narrative
The third shift is one Elliott describes as brand control. Before HubSpot AEO, Fresha had no structured way to know how answer engines were describing them, or whether those descriptions were accurate, compelling, or consistent. Now, the brand narrative that AI tools return about Fresha reflects the story Fresha wants told: the world's leading booking platform for beauty and wellness, trusted by over 120,000 businesses in 120 countries, and built for the professionals who run the industry.
That consistency compounds. Every time an answer engine recommends Fresha accurately and favorably, it reinforces a prospect's confidence before they ever reach the sales team. The visibility Fresha has built becomes a self-reinforcing advantage.
-1.png?width=215&height=50&name=tka-purple%20(2)-1.png)
.png?width=215&height=50&name=NBS%20Logo_Single_Standard_Colour%20(1).png)
.png?Blue_RGB%20(1).png&width=215&height=50&name=AllicaBank_Orange%26Blue_RGB%20(1).png?Blue_RGB%20(1).png)
